Lord Flight: Keith Joseph without the erudition
Posted on Thursday 25 November, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party, The right
WITH four nippers himself, Lord Flight presumably knows a thing or two about fertility. And the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party is obviously worried that while Britain’s scallies get busy knocking up their babymothers every time you let one of the little buggers out of the Young Offenders’ Institution, nice people are progressively being priced out of the sprog market.
Flight has told the London Evening Standard: “We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible.”
This guy is a known big mouth, of course. He was deselected as a Tory candidate in 2005 after getting caught on tape blabbing that a Conservative government would implement more cuts than they were letting on at the time. It’s just a shame no one was that honest in 2010.
Nor is there anything intellectually original in his latest outburst. As long ago as the 1880s, Sir Francis Galton advocated marking families by merit and providing monetary incentives to high scorers to enter into early marriage. That’s more or less what Flight is demanding now.
It seems that Lord F just the latest upholder of the tradition of class-based eugenics that has been a singularly ugly undercurrent in British intellectual life at least since 1798, the year in which an anonymous pamphlet entitled ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ first saw the light of day.
But at least author Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus believed that shortage of food would dependably cull the chavs, and did not directly advocate that this should be an object of national policy.
Flight was already a Conservative Westminster hopeful in 1974, and I am presuming that he was even then on the free market right of the party. If so, it is a fair surmise that he will have been politically sympathetic to the views of Sir Keith Joseph, the man that those who subscribed to that outlook wanted to replace leader Ted Heath.
The job could easily have been his. Then, in a single speech in Edgbaston, Joseph blew his chances by telling the world his true opinions. Britain’s ‘human stock’ was being threatened by unmarried mothers of ‘low intelligence’, he warned. These women were ‘producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters’.
He was, thereafter, political toast. But the spirit of his message, in dumbed down terms at any rate, lives on in Flight’s observations. The Tories are still the nasty party.
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22 Responses to “Lord Flight: Keith Joseph without the erudition”
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Brilliant!!
These views always tend to resurface when the economy is on the rocks! Luckily no one usually listens to these defenders of human purity. As an aside how come these defenders of human purity always look like the most pathetic creatures who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag?
It’s a tribute of sorts to New Labour – by the time they’d finished wrecking the Labour Party they’d moved the ‘centre’ so far Right that there’s nothing much left for the Tories apart from open class war. It’s going to be a rough couple of years, but it is gratifying the way it seems like everyone hates the government – takes me back to the 1980s, and the late 1980s at that.
Dean. How right you are. It is just a regurgitation of the past.
Flight is now on the Lords gravy train. He is almost untouchable now. Laughing up his sleeve whilst collecting his attendance allowance and having a nap on the red seats. Perhaps the only job you get paid for to go to sleep.
Phil. The leftie looney brigade wrecked Labour. Remember the lefties could not get elected to government. Blair and Brown saved Labour from extinction.
I think that might be the best opening line I’ve ever read. I laughed so loudly, a snort came out.
I’m gonna have to start giving this blog a miss. A shame as, despite politics several light years to the right of my own, it is, IMHO, the best written, most thought provoking blog on the left.
Sadly, though, I seem to be developing a Pavlovian response to anything that that right wing ignoramus, Jimmy Glasga spews forth.
This latest takes the biscuit:
“Phil. The leftie looney brigade wrecked Labour. Remember the lefties could not get elected to government. Blair and Brown saved Labour from extinction”
Surely now, no further proof is required of his insanity?
Jimmy, to avoid your usual slippery, underhand methods of avoidance to points riased, I’ll make one FACTUAL, PROVABLE point;
In Liverpool, at the height of Kinnock’s witch-hunt, when openly self-confessed Militant candidates stood on a typical Militant manifesto, the swing TO Labour was HUGE. This stood in stark contrast to swings AWAY from Labour everywhere else in the country. FACT.
The Kinnock policy review was the start and the end was the jettisoning of Clause 4. Not even a pretence, any longer, of pro-working class policies, only a slavish devotion to the market.
Phil is absolutely correct; Blair and Brown DID wreck the party because the electorate, quite sensibly, decided that given a choice of two Tory parties they may as well vote for the real one.
Anyone who can’t grasp that is a fucking idiot of the greatest magnitude. Oh, hang on…
H. Teddy bear oot the pram again. Clause 4 and block votes was never liked by the workers. I attended a meeting early seventies and the workers voted unanimously against it. Only the communist shop steward and pals voted for it. They tried to prevent a vote. They did manage to stop it going to conference.
H. If all those militants were so popular why where Labour not elected to power between 1979 and 1997. Anyhow Scousers will vote for anyone guaranteeing benefits. The fact is Militant infiltrated Labour. They were little dictators. Trots and such. They could never stand on their own unless diguised.
I don’t know why you’re gloating; it’s true.
The fact that this axiom comes from a Tory peer is what irks. Is there a palatable way of saying that we are proud of being stupid, that we are addicted to being losers? That you and others of like-mind will fight for our right to carry on being so? So to speak.
Yes, Lord Flight is an old fart who probably doesn’t have much of a relationship with any class. However, it doesn’t alter the fact that David Osler through his lampooning of what Flight said, has reinforced it’s veracity.
Jimmy, ‘Anyhow Scousers will vote for anyone guaranteeing benefits’.
So now you are working for the BNP, the Sun, the Mail as well as Tory head office and Murdoch. Just how much do they pay you?
The sad thing is Jimmy, it is a bleedin travesty that the Labour party did not throw you out. Instead, capital loving ignorant bigots took it over.
H
‘I’m gonna have to start giving this blog a miss. A shame as, despite politics several light years to the right of my own, it is, IMHO, the best written, most thought provoking blog on the left’
Happy to discuss those light years H.
We can just ignore the cynical grunts in the corner. Stick around.
“Anyhow Scousers will vote for anyone guaranteeing benefits”
You sicken and disgust me beyond measure. ’bout time you booted the Tory troll, Dave.
H. ‘BEYOND MEASURE’. I have to admit I have not heard this term whilst pissing it up with workin class people. I wil mention it to them after they get a round up.
One of the reasons people like Lord Flight are able to get away with these comments is that the official centre-ground has shifted considerably to the right.
What with Ken Livingstone supporting workfare, and Will Hutton coming out on a Radio 4 Programme in favour of more and mroe responsbilities for the poor on benefits, it is hardly surprising that Flight thinks, rightly, that the atmosphere is fine for his kind of views to be pubicly aired.
I was recently suprised to read in Hutton’s latest book (got out when he joined Ipswich Unemployed Action’s hate-list, along with Purnell, Lord Freud, Frank Field, John Bird and Emma A4E to cite but a few), how much he found to like in Liberal-Tory policies.
More on him: http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/them-and-us-will-hutton-the-mirror-of-princes-review/
This at a time when the popular mood, though not unfortunately on welfare, is shifting left.
‘This at a time when the popular mood, though not unfortunately on welfare, is shifting left.’
Give it time Andrew. This has been a long time coming. The right know it. Give it a few months and the student demonstrations will be just a rehearsal and skirmish for the real thing. When the cuts begin to literally hit home.
Even if we lose the battle the war goes on. We are still right.
martin. Those students do not give a fuck about the working class. In fact they probably do not know anything about working class history. Just personal greed old boy. Wake up martin. When I see them on a picket line supporting real workers then I will be convinced about their credentials. Poor wee well heeled souls they are.
So has anyone else read Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism?
She documents the degree to which our supposedly left-leaning ‘intelligentsia’ has quietly returned to crude gender-determinism (as an aside isn’t it interesting that their favourite TV show du jour just happens to be Mad Men?).
If gender has become the key determinative factor in human nature, then it is hardly surprising that elements of eugenics are coming back as well…
But here’s a thing: the original eugenics movement was actually dominated by the left and by feminists – up until the Nazis the right generally wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
So why did so many of our own culture-heroes from a century ago see eugenics as an indispensable part of the socialist project?
To give one example which great revolutionary said in August 1934:
‘While the romantic numskulls of Nazi Germany are dreaming of restoring the old race of Europe’s Dark Forest to its original purity, or rather its original filth, you Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics. Within a century, out of your melting pot of races there will come a new breed of men – the first worthy of the name of Man’.
The answer of course is Trotsky in ‘If America should go Communist’.
Or to give another at random: in 1927 left-communist-feminist Sylvia Pankhurst proudly proclaimed in The News of the World that her son Richard ‘was a “eugenic” baby, because he was born to two intelligent adults as well free from hereditary disease and untrammeled by social convention’.
So do we let the likes of Jonah Goldberg get away with shouting that these sort of statements prove that ‘all progressives are fascists’ – or do we actually try and unpack such statements and apply some real historical analysis of what these comrades actually meant when they talked about eugenics?
Roger. It looks like the Lib/Con alliance are a perfect example of white right wing human eugenics. The two leaders look twinned and joined at the hip.
Funny enough because of the widely known genetic strengthening due to hybridization the working class is likely to produce far better children than the upper and middle classes as there is more likely to be bigger genetic differences between the partners in this group. (That is there are more likely to be mixed marriages among the working class.) The weaknesses produced in more insular groups such as the Windsors and some religious sects are evidence of this truth.
I was looking for the phrase “hybrid vigour” yesterday but I couldn’t remember it. Today I have it. Maybe I need some of it.
And now I realize that public and independent schools are educational facilities to help children with special needs. Coming out of such a limited gene pool they need this extra help to compete with the working class kids if their class is still to run the country.
After listening to an interview with Luciana Berger, the Labour MP parachuted into the Liverpool Wavetree constituency; shame on you Luciana! With genetic material from your great-uncle Manny Shinwell you had no need to take a place from a more needy middle-class child at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls. That was taking an unfair advantage. Something you seem to have done again in Liverpool.
‘Wake up martin. When I see them on a picket line supporting real workers then I will be convinced about their credentials. Poor wee well heeled souls they are’
Still at it then Jimmy. You never did answer my question. How much are the Con Dems paying you? Or for that matter Ed Milliband.
I have yet to see a bloody word from you here supporting any form of opposition to the cuts. All we get is dripping Daily Mail cynicism from you Jimmy. The surest way to ensure there will not be any bloody picket lines for the students to join. I take it that is why you are on the payroll. Laugh at this. Kick at that. Undermine, contradict and go out of your way to look for anything that can divide us.
People like you have undermined the left for 30 years. It is partly why we are where we are. A bloody walking open goal. I was fighting cynics like you in 82. I called them right wing, they called me extreme. How little changes.
I would say ‘Wake up Jimmy’. Be a bit like asking the Mail to stop tomorrows print run though. Wouldn’t it?
As I said